1 THE · : NEW .OIlKl it IV - ... . . 'I I . - '" · ;:.'-, V : .. ... " ,? > . . - I ,- __.t ..... - /l r' .- - ... <no" It nu. 1 1/ )1\\\ ll'\ ; 0 0 .... . · 0 . -'\ . '.,.- # ". THE, TALI( OF THE, TOWN Notes and Comment X L the familiar sights and sounds of summer have left us with a feeling of incompletion. It is un- derstandable enough: there can be no summer for us till we see a horse in a straw hat, his ears sticking through. He should be attached, preferably, to a yel- low sprinkling cart. Until such an ob- ject swims into our fuddled ken, there will be no summer that amounts to anything. }è DIO CITY comes close home to us-comes within a couple of blocks, in fact. In our position there is reason enough to be worried. It is bad enough to work in a ditn office in West Forty-fifth Street across from the Har- vard Club, an office full of stalactites and broken partitions and broken dreams; but in time things will get even worse, because West Forty-fifth Street will be nothing but a suburb of Radio City. That will make us a com- muter, or a beaver, or something. We understand practically nothing about Radio City. We don't know why it is called a city, we don't know why Rockefeller should suddenly become agitated about radio and vaudeville, and least of all do we understand why the architects and promoters should be allowed to perpetrate the old crime: erecting a lot of tall buildings where the streets are already too crowded. Still, it will be a great .place for people who live in Tudor City to crawl to on their hands and knees. M R. LEWIS MUMFORD put Radio City into words in a recent issue of this frightened magazine. We share his dread of the organized chaos of the Rockefellian dream. We have learned through secret channels that Mayor Walker has been approached by an interested party with the sug- gestion that the city condemn the Fifth A venue property directly oppo- site St. Patrick's Cathedral and make it into a small park. This, presum- ably, would improve and safeguard the architectural significance of the Ca- thedral, at the same time letting in a little air on the radio encampment. The same person suggests that the pro- posed opera house, if built, should be erected right on this park, facing the Cathedral. He also proposes widen- ing Sixth Avenue from Forty-eighth to Fifty-first. All these suggestions sound to us like improvements over the original plans, but we should add that practically any suggestion at all would sound to us like an improve- ment, and that we would trade the whole project of Radio City for two fairly comfortable beer gardens in Cen- tral Park devoted to the interests of per- sons anxious to forget, rather than abet, the wide dissemination of all kinds of unrelated sound. T HROUGH the incessant mini- strations of such agencies as Good Housekeeping, department-store base- ments, and the Dennison Manufactur- ing Company, the American home is rapidly becoming a dangerously attrac- tive place in which to live. Even cheap household furnishings are good- looking; even Woolworth glassware has charm; and there are no end of little items that women learn to create with their own hands from perusing the magazines. We like to brood over what effect this Golden Age of Home Decoration is having on the American Male, who views any signs of artistry on his premises with a sort of suspicious awe. Probably it is gradually under- mInIng his character. There was a time when a breadwinner, returning at night, could sweep his hand over his hideous but comprehensible domain and say: "I have created all this." It gave him a feeling of peace and well-being. Now, returning from his desk in the South Bend Brass Works, and coming into a parlor of hooked rugs, early pine tables, and lampshades constructed by his wife from old French prints, all he . " s h can murmur IS: ay, w at goes on around here?" I t makes him uneasy, and the first thing he knows he is not sleeping well at night. W AITERS are a special breed and deserve special study. They have, for one thing, a virtual monopoly of scorn. Theirs is a high, en viable con- tempt-you must have encountered it, as we continually do. In a speakeasy two women, seated at a table, are joined by two other women, which causes the whole party to remove to another table, discommoding the wait- ers. The tactical maneuver is executed in full view of several other waiters who stand motionless with their scorn, a look in their eye that says: "For a million years women have done small and '"inconsiderable things to inconveni- ence and worry men; and now, here, in this illegal and badly ventilated res- taurant in this degenerate and inex- cusable century they are still doing those small irritating things. Bad cess